When Beggars Die There Are No Comets Seen
by seirios aster
Summary: Andromeda receives an unexpected visitor in the dead of night after a battle.


Andromeda did not expect the knock on her door. Moreover, she did not expect the man standing at the threshold. He was dead, after all.

The only words that passed between them sounded halfway between a croak and mewling. "He's dead." Andromeda's face remained blank yet wavered when the bluenotgrey (_whywasthisghosthere_) eyes met hers and the disused voice continued, "She killed him."

There was no reason for her to leave the door open nor listen to the ghost. This way laid madness, and Andromeda would not succumb. She would live her happy ending. Andromeda lived happily ever after with Perseus till the end of her days (while Narcissus drowned, Amazons fell from grace, and cats and dogs tore themselves apart).

Yet she did not slam the door in the ghost's face.

"Leave," Andromeda said, amazed at her own voice.

And yet those eyes. They expected this reception despite that feathery torturer called Hope. (Sometimes in the dead of night, Andromeda wondered if she shouldn't have been named Pandora. She let loose the deluge but kept Hope for the others. That celestial/infernal creature destroyed them as well as if not more than the horrors she unleashed and left unfettered.)

The very human (_alive_) acceptance of guilt and pain and fault led to the beginning of a turn, and Andromeda refused to be one of the Kindly Ones. Despite herself, she flinched when her hand grasped the solid arm of a living man with a beating heart. He only stopped.

"Why not my sister?" she asked, wondering if she should not have been the Goddess of Crossroads and not a princess chained to a rock for her parents' transgressions.

Orpheus returned from the underworld would not have looked half full of pain as the man in front of her. With the regret of Achilles speaking to Odysseus of his kingdom of dust and dead, the shadow of a man murmured, "Why disturb her? His blood needs not be on her hands as well."

Andromeda stared long and hard at the living dead, this Prometheus eaten by grief. He was nothing (everything) like Demeter wandering and searching for her daughter (his salvation), but she knew she had to give him shelter from this storm. Andromeda was the one that lived happily ever after, so she risked guiding the shade away from the river Lethe and to her hearth.

He shivered despite the heat, and Andromeda knew there was no panacea for what had happened. The fire might dry the rain (tears) on his face, but not even Apollo could heal what had been done.

There they remained, holding vigil to the fire like Hestia but unwilling to leave not for duty but for facing the goddess Aletheia. Andromeda should have been named otherwise for inviting these inauspicious stars upon them. Then she would not have succumbed to Morpheus' lies and housed the brilliant liar Hope.

And she would not have a wrecked, wretched shell of a man crying into his hands over the fall (death) of the brightest star in the heavens (his brother). A lion's heart could still be rent to the quick if shielded only by meager tin, and a maddened Amazon's bloody blade more than sufficed.

Andromeda bore her duty and stood witness to his pain, as she should, but there was no hero to save the man in front of her from the monster he had to fight. The dread goddesses of retribution would have their pound of flesh from him no matter what his actions. He was far too late to spare himself from that fate, and Andromeda could not help him.

"I was too late," he cried, and she knew he meant by an eternity and but a moment.

"You couldn't have done anything," Andromeda consoled, repeating her words from a lifetime ago to a different star mourning the loss of a younger, more innocent one.

"No, I could have," he contradicted, the fire reigniting in his lion heart and threatening to consume him whole.

Andromeda willingly stared into the dimming blue eyes she had avoided. "You could not have defeated Bellatrix, and Sirius would have died to protect you, had he known you were going to try," she declared, facing the serpent of her doubt. (Because even the brightest star in the sky would have fallen for this one. This she knew.)

A quorum of antimony wouldn't have shattered as quickly as he did, but Andromeda was not one for alchemy. She now only saw her baby cousin sobbing uncontrollably over the death of his brother, and the least she could do was offer him a place to rest for a while.

(Tonight she would be Athena and assuage the guilt of Orestes.)


End file.
